Santa Sid will admit to owning a “summer home” in Eden Prairie, but he doesn’t want his real name to appear in print. No, strike real name. Better to say that he doesn’t want the name of his Clark Kent–like alter ego to become known. Some parent at the Mall of America in Bloomington, where Sid has reigned as Santa Claus for 14 holiday seasons, might blurt out the Kent alias in front of a child.
And then where would the kid be? Confused, doubtful, maybe robbed of the full Santa experience. Not the experience of humoring Mom and Dad by sitting on the lap of some character with a fake beard, but the wide-eyed wonder of coming face to face with the real Kris Kringle in the flesh. Jolly Old St. Nick himself.
Sid is his actual first name, but it also stands for “Santa in disguise.”
“In this guy’s mind, he’s really Santa,” says Brent Uzzo, owner of Professor Bellows Photography of Des Moines, Iowa, which operates an Old Time Photo studio at the Mall of America. Uzzo is Sid’s employer (“Let’s just say we work together”) and the person who runs the annual Santa operation under a contract with Mall of America. Families from around the country have adopted Sid as their personal Santa Claus. People from Texas and Georgia make annual pilgrimages to visit him at the mall. Some who met Sid when they were seven years old now bring their own children to see him.
“To them, he is Santa,” Uzzo says. “My own daughter is 23, and she still sits on Santa’s lap every year.”
So popular did Sid become that waits of more than four hours were not uncommon. Two years ago, he was made an appointment-only Santa, moving from his long-time quarters in the Park at MOA (formerly Camp Snoopy) to a workshop set in a storefront on the mall’s third floor. Another Santa, managed by a different photography company, now handles walk-in traffic.
“I’ll get together with Sid in the middle of August and kids wave at him,” Uzzo says. He is not referring only to children who know Sid from the mall. And Sid himself is not referring just to MOA visitors when he says: “I get recognized around town all year. Kids are smart. They know who I am.”
Santa’s Wish: “We Want Them to Tug the Beard”
The attitude that being St. Nick involves being St. Nick and not just play-acting is not uncommon among professional, real-bearded Clauses. Neither is reticence about having one’s given name bandied about.
Santa Carlucci, who appears around the Twin Cities at private and corporate parties, daycare centers, and hospitals, concedes that he is sometimes known as Carl Immediato, 62, of Bloomington. He reveals that identity, however, only because this article is for a business magazine that children are unlikely to read, and only after we promise to mention the name no more than once.
